Noam Chomsky: Trump is a ‘sociopathic maniac’ capable of provoking ‘civil war’ if he doesn’t win

“Unhinged,” “thuggish,” “racist,” “undisciplined” and “appalling” are among the many derogatory adjectives that have been used to describe President Donald Trump’s performance during his debate with former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday, September 29. But such adjectives were being used to describe Trump long before the debate, and one author who has not been shy about stressing that he considers Trump to be the most dangerous president of his lifetime is Noam Chomsky — who, in an interview with Smashing Interviews Magazine published this week, laid out a variety of reasons why he is so troubled by Trump’s presidency.

The fact that Chomsky considers Trump’s presidency the absolute worst he has ever lived through is saying a lot considering his age. The left-wing author, now 91, was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, when Republican Calvin Coolidge was still president and Herbert Hoover was four months away from being sworn into office. Chomsky is old enough to remember everything from the Great Depression and World War II to Watergate to 9/11 — and now, he is living through the worst health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919. Trump’s COVID-19 response, Chomsky stressed during the interview, has been disastrous.

Chomsky told Smashing Interviews, “In Trump’s first days in office back in January 2017, some of his first acts were to dismantle the pandemic response program that had been executed under (President Barack) Obama. He immediately started efforts to defund the Center for Disease Control and all other health-related aspects of the government. That went on for years and went on as late as this past February. While the pandemic was raging, he was denying — and other countries were reacting. Trump presented his budget proposal for 2021 defunding the Center for Disease Control even further.”

But COVID-19 is only one of the reasons why Chomsky is so troubled by Trump’s presidency. Chomsky, during the interview, also lambasted Trump for everything from his terrible environmental record and failing to take climate change seriously to showing a total contempt for liberal democracy.

“On the climate issue,” Chomsky warned, “Trump continues to make it much more dangerous. Deterioration of democracy has reached a truly incredible point. Trump’s already cleansed the executive branch of any independent voice. The inspectors general who are supposed to supervise executive departments started looking into the swamp of corruption Trump has created; so, he fired them.”

Chomsky continued, “The latest move was to publicly state that if he doesn’t like the outcome of the election, he may refuse to accept it. That’s never happened in the history of parliamentary democracies. And now, people in high places are taking him seriously. There’s a high level independent commission of leading figures in the Republican and Democratic parties and other independent analysts that’s been running ‘war games,’ asking what’s likely to happen in the coming election if Trump refuses to leave office.”

The 91-year-old author even went so far as to say that he believes Trump is unhinged enough to encourage a civil war in the United States.

Chomsky told Smashing Interviews, “Unless Trump wins the Electoral College, every scenario they run leads to civil war if Trump and the Republicans just refuse to accept it. There are a lot of options they could pursue to try and undermine it. It’s like the actions of a dictator in a neo-colony somewhere — a small country that has a military coup every couple of years. There is no historical precedent for this in a functioning democratic society. That’s deterioration of democracy at a level we’ve never seen before and being taken very seriously in the most respectable places…. We have a sociopathic maniac in the White House.”

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